Password Security Scanner 1.31

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Password Security Scanner is a useful portable tool which makes it easy to assess the strength of any Internet Explorer, Outlook, Firefox, Live Mail or Windows Messenger passwords which might be stored on your PC.

A little surprisingly, the program doesn't display the passwords itself, instead just showing you information about them: the password length, the number of numeric, lower and upper case characters, and other details, as well as then using all of these to calculate a score defining the password's overall strength. (Which the author defines as, Very Weak: 1-7, Weak: 8-14, Medium: 15-25, Strong: 26-45, and Very Strong: 46 or over.)

The author is assuming that you'll be using Password Security Scanner on a PC with several users, though, and so this approach does make some sense. It means you'll be able to tell if a particular person is creating very short passwords, say, without them feeling their privacy is compromised by the program revealing the full password to you.

Of course if your PC has a large number of users, most of them using Internet Explorer and saving their passwords, then you may have a very long list of entries to explore. You can sort the Password Security Scanner report by clicking individual column headers, though, so selecting "Password Strength" will highlight the weakest passwords immediately.

And if you select Options > Advanced Options, then you're also able to tell the program to display only passwords below a particular strength value, so again your attention will be drawn to the "problem" passwords right away.

Verdict

Password Security Scanner offers a simple way to audit the strength of many passwords stored on your PC. It would be more useful if it displayed a text description of that strength as well as a figure, though, so you didn't have to try and remember what 27 or any other figure actually meant.